Let's Explore Some Stuff!

Some of my favorite things to do involve doing something new in a new place. Exploring a new park, a new restaurant, or even a new hobby. Yearning for the new became a struggle when I had to decide what was my absolute favorite thing to do, aka picking a major I would want for the rest of my life, that involved having to always learn new things in different places. This led to taking various kinds of classes from all different aspects when I was in community college. Taking these classes, I definitely found what wasn’t my favorite thing, but finding my favorite, not so easy. While there’s a lot to learn and keep learning from whatever major it is that you chose, I wanted a combination of the environment, new places, new things to explore, and being outside. I found a combination of all of that in geography.

For me, geography has many different components to it but by far my favorite thing about geography is its association with the exploration of new places and concepts. I’ve always liked exploring new locations and wondering what makes it different from other places. Hiking and going to local state parks is also one of my favorite pass times, at least when I have some time to spare, because it makes me wonder about the surroundings while enjoying them, plus it’s a great workout! Looking at surroundings and wondering how it will change in years to come led to me to the environmental branch of geography because I wonder how and why our environmental changes. Knowing that there will be change and new research that constantly needs to be done has definitely overlapped with our research project.  

My interest in exploring and learning about a different location has overlapped with our research project in that we are out in the field physically looking at the different changes of buffers. This week Stephanie and I got the opportunity to look a particular stream with the biology team and learned to how measure a stream and do some macro-invertebrate testing. It was fun to walk around and do some walking around the stream, though a little bit scary with the many creatures that lurked around there, especially a wolf spider we saw! It was creepy yet awesome so the spider in its natural habitat. This research will take us to several different locations along Wilson Creek, which we got the opportunity to scout this week, and we will get the opportunity how each location is either different or similar to each other and learning and exploring along the way.